I think there’s a way to make SC4 a strong reality… which seems very difficult, considering many conflicts of interest.
Here is the top ten list of most frequently answered ‘pain points’ from the most recent survey, most of them are related:
- Documentation is missing / unclear
- Tutorial materials are missing / unclear
- Debugging is difficult
- Errors messages confusing
- sclang syntax is difficult
- making GUI’s is difficult
- …too many ways of doing things
…and so with so many ideas contributing to the same idea pool, it seems the language has become to an extent scattered and disorganized.
I’ve been thinking of the possibility of organizing SC’s reference source into 4/5 main sections… something like:
Client Server Guides Extensions
…with perhaps GUI being the fifth, or perhaps as a client abstraction.
Guides would be reserved for reference material to cross boundaries, as well as introductory material.
Each one of the four, five, or six Main sections would then have a limited number of sub-sections (abstractions like Collections, Streams, Ugens, JITLib, etc.) …and each sub-section would most likely end with it’s own dedicated tutorial, and it’s class reference.
It’s just an idea… to keep everything organized would make it easier for everyone when trying to meet a specific intent, as well as for building extensions that fit in well with the rest of the language.